White MacBook 2009 - Quick and dirty file recovery suggestions please?

[Alekto]

Hey guys. I hope you all can help me out.

I recently upgraded my friend's polycarbonate MacBook. I don't have the exact specs but I think it was a late or mid 2009 with NVidia graphics. I replaced the stock HDD with a Samsung SSD and put 4GB Ram in it. He was also experiencing problems with the battery, so I changed that for him too.

Up to that point it was all great. I even installed Mavericks for him and he was very happy (he even threw me 50 bucks for my trouble). It's quite a screamer for the low outlay

I gave him the old HDD back and told him to put it in a USB case and just recover what he wanted (mostly his iPhoto and iMovie library). However he is now experiencing problems because his photo and movie library are larger than the new SSD's capacity. I didn't think of that at the time. Oops!

What would be, say, the best way of getting those files off the HDD, putting them somewhere else temporarily, formatting the HDD and then putting those files back on so he can just use his old HDD as external storage? Sorry if this is a bit long winded.

Secondly. He was not happy with Mavericks and downgraded back to Snow Leopard (presumably 10.6.8).

Any ideas? His constant texts for support are getting a bit irritating.


EDIT : Sorry, essentially I'm after a more elegant solution than the one I propose. I'm sure I have overlooked something.

 

[trevm999]

Why don't you just delete everything except the iPhoto and iMovie library off the hard drive instead of reformatting it? Tell iPhoto and iMovie just to open the library off of the external hard drive.

The problem with this is that his iPhoto and iMovie libraries will not be backed up by Time Machine. Sounds like it is a recipe for disaster because it may be the original hard drive and could be failing (especially since it sounds like he was experiencing performance issues)

 

[WildCard^]

Yes, let no good deed go unpunished, or something like that. When he slipped you $50, that wasn't for past labor, that bought your expertise for the future.

Is the polycarbonate case able to allow the swap out of the super drive for a second drive? If so, then you have the benefits of the OS being on the boot/SSD drive, and you have the storage space of a regular HD locally.

I like Trev's line of thinking. Run a good HD test on the original drive. You don't want to do all this and find out the original system's performance was degrading slowly due to an increasingly failing HD.

As an aside, I am alarmed that he overrode your 10.9 install and put 10.6 on it. I personally stop feeling obligated to assist once the user starts applying fixes, assuming the user has taken control/responsibility for the operation.